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Opinion: Guest Opinions

Henry G. Beer: Broadening the council candidate pool

By Henry G. Beer

Posted:
05/28/2016 09:00:00 PM MDT

When I arrived in Boulder 35 years ago, City Council meetings though lively and occasionally long, generally lasted little more than three hours. At the time I served on the Landmarks Advisory Board and observed that council members would spend from 12 to 20 hours a month studying their materials. In the '70s, Boulder had a strong mayor, an empowered (and effective) city manager, department heads that had authority and autonomy and a council that saw its role as that of a policy-making and governing rather than a managing body. Council left the actual management and execution of initiatives in the capable hands of the well-paid, talented professionals and their staffs who headed up Boulder's various departments.

Today, a council seat carries altogether impractical requirements, making the time commitment for almost anyone with a conventional work/life virtually impossible. It is why we have the sitting council members we have today.

This can and must change. The time commitment can be dramatically reduced if council refocused on ends and outcomes rather than means and tactics. While we appreciate the time current council members currently invest, without a new governance model our community will continue to severely limit the pool from which the community can attract and elect council candidates.

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The traditional Boulder working person, in their late 20s through early 50s, is significantly underrepresented in the candidate pool. Members of the community in that age group simply cannot dedicate the time the current governance model demands. It may be that the embarrassingly low turnout in council elections speaks far more to the paucity of candidate choices than to apathy on the part of the electorate.

What then can be done by citizens (or potential candidates) to return the Boulder City Council to a governance rather than management model? Here are some thoughts gleaned from work that has been done by others on policy governance:

• The council must focus on ends rather than means, defining and setting the constraints and parameters for staff to achieve those ends. An open and thorough debate about ends and desired outcomes among candidates would focus community and candidates on values (ends) rather than issues and specific answers (means). Staff would then be expected to present strategies, alternative solutions — all of which are means — for achieving the ends the council has articulated.

• This behavior will empower and legitimize the roles of city manager and senior staff, making their jobs more effective and rewarding. As anyone who has been the victim of micromanagement by a misguided executive or a poorly governed board can recount, such a position is both debilitating professionally and emotionally. It dampens enthusiasm and commitment. It stifles creativity along with general job performance. It is poor and ineffective leadership. It is, in fact, not leadership at all.

• An ends-and-outcomes focus will clarify and streamline council, once again making it a realistic form of community service. With a focus on ends, council spends its time refining and debating at a high level policy values and outcomes, requiring of its staff only that they demonstrate their recommendations can be shown to align with the ends council agreed upon.

The current time-intensive and meeting-intensive format discourages potential candidates who don't have endless hours to "manage," or worse, micromanage their professional staff.

There are a number of tested and effective policy governance models that have been developed for councils, planning boards and nonprofits. Investigating these alternative models would be a reasonable way to move toward more time-efficient and effective outcomes.

Until we as a community insist upon and commit to a better and more effective means of governance, we will continue to struggle with limited, narrow council candidate choices. This in turn will continue to deprive our community of the best possible leadership talent.

A committee is now looking into paying council to compensate for the long hours of study and meeting. Council members should not be spending these long hours in the first place. As I have pointed out, this behavior actually undermines staff and it is what the community already pays our city manager, city attorney, planning director, parks and rec director and their staffs to do. Providing council with a larger paycheck for managing instead of governing validates council's current questionable governance model.

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